Media Centre's - Plex

I've been looking into different media centres for use in my home. I made a previous post about XBMC. This showed a lot of promise, but had a few issues (since that post I've tried the SVN version and a lot of the problems have been resolved). Since the main use I have a media center is on a mac mini below the DVD, I though I'd give Plex ago.

Plex is a media center that was forked for XMBC and only works on Intel MacOSX. The aims of the project are to produce more integrated version of XMBC for OSX.

As I stated in my previous post, I've been running MediaCentral from Equinux. However this had a few problems:

• Unable to eject the DVD!
• Not able to play .mkv's (they don't show up in the media lists)
• No plugin support
• No meta data display

Also whilst looking at XMBC I found that playback of media was choppy (This might not be the case with the SVN version, I've yet to try this).

Anyway I'll start of by saying, I've been very impressed with Plex. First of it plays all my media files with no problems, both low def and high def content.

Once of the features that I really like is the the remote control support. Both Plex and XMBC (I'd not tried this till now) allow you to use a harmony remote. So I no longer need to use the apple remote with it's limited buttons. This has been really great. It makes the media center much more usable as I refuse to attack a keyboard and mouse to something below the TV.

It's also possible to add special buttons for things like "Eject". So finally I'm able to eject DVD's from the mac mini with the use of a remote control. This is quite a big deal as I've always had to do it via SSH session from a laptop before.

The plugin support has been hugely improved from what I'd seen with XBMC. I've been using the iPlayer plugin and this is very responsive and no longer needs to spend ages reading content from the BBC.

The interface for downloading new plugins is very slick, I was quite impressed. You just go to the application section and select the pluing you wish to install. This was a big advantage over XMBC. Another nice feature is the automatic update. I was prompted to ask if I wanted to install the latest version. I select yes (with the remote control) and it installed the latest version!

Plex inherits all the good features of XMBC, so it has some really good themes (once i got used to default on called "MediaStream" I've really got to like it.) It's meta data support is also great.

The only negative I've found so far is that it does not allow the playing of DVD's. From what I've been able to find out, they claim that this is buggy and have disabled it. This is a real pain, at the moment I've using the PS3 to play DVD's. I'm hoping that this gets turned back on at some point. It's worth noting that XBMC has no problems with DVD's.

So in conclusion a very good media center for the OSX machines that does everything I'd want with the exception of DVD playback.

Media Centre's - XBMC

I've been looking around for a media centre to use. I have a mac mini below the TV that is used to play content stored on my server. I'm currently running MediaCentral from Equinux. However this has a few problems:

• Unable to eject the DVD!
• Not able to play .mkv's (they don't show up in the media lists)
• No plugin support
• No meta data display

So because of these problems I've been looking around for other media centre's. The first I've looked at is XBMC. I'm looking for a nice looking media centre that hopefully works on windows, Linux and OSX. Though OSX is the only one currently that I must have it working on. I'm also looking for it to fix the above problems, as well as been fast. One other feature I'd really like to see, is the ability to get the metadata from the MediaInfoFetcher application I wrote.

So first off XBMC seems to work on linux, windows and OSX. However after playing around with it a bit this is not quite the case. I could not get it to start on my OpenSuSE Linux box at all, it just complains about a problem with Open GL. I suspect that this is a problem with the ATI Linux graphics drivers and 64 bit, though no other app has a problem. I tried it on a different Linux box, and it started fine their.

The windows setup was a little odd, first it seemed to be working fine, then I tried to setup the media, which is on remote samba shares as far as windows is concerned. This did not work as a XBMC witch is odd given that you would expect windows shares to work very well on windows. So I tried mapping them to drive letters, and got one of the sources add to XBMC. However I was not able to add the others. Every time I tried, I though the drive letter as relative to the users home directory. So not very usable on windows!

Next I tried it on OSX on my mac mini, this is the device that really matter as it's below the TV. I'll be expecting HD 1080p output for this and surround sound via the digital out of the mac mini. I also need the remote control to work as this device does not have a keyboard or mouse. All this stuff pretty much worked. The remote control functions took a bit of getting used to, but was actually quite good. All the previous mention problems were fixed, I could even eject DVD's and play lots of different media types.

Next up I wanted to try some plugins. One of the ones I was most eager to try was the iPlayer plugin. This worked very well. on mac os, but not on windows. It was actually very impressive watching iPlayer content on the large TV screen, makes you wonder if you still need a TV tuner.

I then tried to watch some media files, and this is were the mac OSX problems started. It would start of playing quite nicely, then become choppy. This is low def content, so it's quite unexpected. This content plays fine in Frontrow and MediaCentral. Also fast forwarding on the remote seemed a bit clunky and made things go choppy to.

The meta data display was great for films, however did not work very well for TV shows. Mainly because I wanted to be able to store them in a directory and take the show name from the directory. This was only supported for films, but I only wanted to do it for TV shows. It has the ability to add scrapers for different sites via XML files, which is quite nice, but I could not find anyway of parsing data fetch my own application.

In summary, it's a really nice media center with a lot of potential. At the moment, it does not quite meet all my needs due to the different problems on different platforms. I think the the choppy playback could be solved I'd probably use it.

OpenSUSE Build Service

Whenever I install a new Linux system, I always find that their are packages I'm unable to get. So I usually end up building these from source. This is then something that needs to be done every time I reinstall :-(

It occurred to me that I'd be better of learning how to create RPM's and install things that way. This did make things a lot better, however getting them onto multiple systems and having to rebuild them when I upgrade the distribution was still a bit of a pain.

So I though I'd give the OpenSUSE build service ago. First thing I did not reliase was that when you create a account, you get your own Repository. Any packages you build go into here and then they can be moved to other projects if you want to.

So I've done this with my packages and now I just register my repository on my system and use the package manager to update the packages and install updates. This works great!. You can also say what distrobutions your packages should be built for and the build service builds them. This will make upgrading a lot easier.

So all in all, I think once the initial learning of RPM spec files and the build service was out the way, thing have got a lot easier and this will probably save me a lot of time.

I've now started adding some of my own projects, and things I usally build from source. Hopefully they will be usefull for other people too.

Upgrading to OpenSuSE 11.1 Some issues.

So as I previously mentioned, I've been upgrading my machines to OpenSuSE 11.1. First of I have to save it's very impressive. As previously mentioned, it's great that ALSA works now on my laptop.

I've also upgraded my work computer, and this has been having issues resolving host names. I think I've not tracked this not to a IP v6 problem. I found out how to disable it here. Now things are much better on this machine.

On my laptop I've seeing problem with the networking. Basicly I use knetworkmanager to control the networking via the NetworkManager does not work unless you run it as root. It will launch as not root, but is unable to find either the wired or wireless networks. I suspect this is to do with dbus permissions but I don't yet know much about these :-( More investigation is needed.

UPDATE: I've tracked things down a bit more. I've been having problems with KDM, probally due to something I've done and my use of a usable version. So I've been starting X from the command line. I just tried GDM instead, it seems it must set something up when it's started, cause now I can see networks in the new KDE network applet and knetworkmanager from kde3! Hopefully when I fix up KDM, that will also work.

Dell Studio 1535 OpenSuse 11.0 and latest ALSA

Over the Christmas I set about updating from OpenSuSE 11.0 to OpenSuSE 11.1. I always like to have the latest and greatest distro :-)

So I changed all my sources in Yast/Zypper over to the 11.1 distro and a manual update of most the packages, then the rest with a zypper dup. It all went pretty smoothly, the only exceptions were the kernel modules I'd compiled my self. These were the ATI graphics drivers (fglrx), the wireless drivers.

The first was a simple fix, I just reinstalled the ATI drivers. The second has been a bit more compilated as the broadcom source does not build agist the lastest kernel. Howerver I think I have a fix for this, so will blog about that another time when I've had a chance to test it.

The best thing I've notice so that about OpenSUSE 11.1 is that the sound hardware in the latop now works correctly!!! without any hacking. The sound is much louder, and both ear phone sockets work. Also the laptops internal speakers cut out with you plug speakers/head phones into either headphone socket. I put this done to the latest version of ALSA been in the OpenSuSE 11.1 release. Fantastic!

Just released version 1.1 of MediaInfoFetcher

I've just released version 1.1 of MediaInfoFetcher. This is a application that can be used to find Film and TV Show meta data, and store it in various formats. It also can be used to rename media files using this data. The latest version can be found here.

Changes are as follows:

• Able to rename Films with data fetched from the web.
• Added new Film source for fetching film information from www.imdb.com.
• Updated stores to store film information.
• Added new MP4 store for storing metadata in mp4 files used in iTunes.
• Added support for renaming .mp4 and .m4v files.
• Film posters are fetched from the Internet and stored in .mp4 and .m4v files.
• Updated to the latest format changes of www.tv.com site.

Happy Christmas! let me know if their are any bugs in this release.

Dell Studio 1535 Fan Speed problem and bios update

I've been away with work for a week and I left my laptop at home (used a work one instead :-( ). When I came back and turned my laptop, I discovered a problem. For some reason the fan speed was set to be full speed all the time. This seemed to happen strait from boot, no matter what I did to change it.

My first though was that the temperature was a problem, so I checked this and the laptop is running quite cool. The cores were running between 22 and 24 degrees C.

So after fiddling around for a while I though I'd update the bios to the latest version. To my surprise, this fixed it! I'd love to know what might have caused the problems, if anyone has any ideas. As of yet , I've not tracked down a change log for the BIOS update.

Updating the BIOS from Linux had it's own problems, so I though I'd detail what I did to fix it. First off make sure you have the dell Linux firmware tools and libsmbios installed.

These can be found in the OpenSUSE repos. http://linux.dell.com/repo/community/content/suse11.0-x86_64/

Next you need to download the bios update from the dell support website. This comes as a .exe file, so you will need to extract the .HDR file from the .exe. To do this I used the following command:

wine 1535_A05.EXE -writehdrfile -nopause

This uses wine to extract it to the current directory.

Next you need to update the bios, do so at your own risk. This worked for me, but you do so at your own risk. Use the following command:

modprobe dell_rbu
dellBiosUpdate -u --hdr 1535_A05.hdr



Now reboot your system. When it reboots, it will install the new bios. Then it reboots itself again.
You should be able to see the new version number of the bios on the boot screen.

It's worth noting that the most useful information on updating the dell BIOS from Linux, I found here


Now back to having a nice quite laptop!